This is the first time the novels by Sir Philip Pullman are adapted into a television series. The previous film adaptation, À la croisée des mondes : La Boussole d'or (2007), was once cited by the author George R.R. Martin as one of the reasons he wanted Game of Thrones (2011) to be a television series rather than a feature film. Martin later shared his thoughts on the series on Twitter, calling it "SO much better than the feature film." There are only three novels in Pullman's series, however, and several in Martin's, so it's not surprising the original plan was to adapt His Dark Materials into a film trilogy.
Dafne Keen (Lyra) and Will Keen (Father MacPhail) are real-life daughter and father. This marks their second professional collaboration.
Leonardo da Vinci's painting "Lady with an Ermine" helped Sir Philip Pullman visualize his idea for the concepts of animal spirits.
During the title sequence, at roughly thirty seconds, you can see a knife in Lyra's silhouette, and as the camera retracts, it goes through an amber glass disk. This refers to The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000), the second and third entries in the His Dark Materials series by Phillip Pullman.
The title comes from a line in John Milton's "Paradise Lost".